This week’s readings on private-sector system thinking light up across the board of the systems analytical approaches we’ve examined so far this term, so I thought I’d run down my thinking about how it all fits together in some detail. Here goes…
The article on wicked problems in business puts some of the ideas we’ve been developing this term – about complexity as well as multiple stakeholder perspectives on systems – to work in a private sector context. It’ll give you a chance to review the very useful idea of wicked problems, as well as think about solution strategies, such as feed-forward planning processes, focusing on experimentation and learning-by-doing, collaborative multi-stakeholder dialogue, and the importance of knowing your core identity (which resonated for me with “Seeing Like a State”, which emphasized changing the identity of forests and villagers as a core state-making practice).
The short article on “The art of systems thinking” shows how a bunch of ideas we’ve been discussing are critical in managing a business, including an emphasis on mapping the system with multiple perspectives (a soft systems approach), addressing power relations to build trust (a critical systems approach), and focusing on systems innovation rather than just problem solving (transformative regime change).
“The Big Idea” by the famous climber/entrepreneur Yves Chouinard (kind of an Elon Musk type figure when he was in his prime) worked for me on 2 levels – as a description of cutting-edge approaches to sustainability assessment (a technique we will model in class), and ideas about how these changes could bring about larger changes in the system in which sustainability assessment is embedded – changing the way that investors, markets, regulators, and consumers behave to foster a much more deep-rooted and influential sustainability transition. I imagined what a results chain mapping of the ideas in this paper would look like, embedding a sustainability assessment process that included ecosystem services and value-chain indices inside a broader logic for change, in which the normal operation of market rationality – not reliant on a transformation of our ethics or anything fancy like that- led to widespread adoption of sustainable practices, from Fortune 500 firms and Wall Street Banks, all the way out to countless global suppliers of raw material.
In this light, the articles in State of Green Business Report were fascinating, and timely. While the Chouinard article left me with a sense that this was cutting-edge thinking but still rather marginal – and it was written in 2011, which now seems worlds away – the articles in this collection enabled me to see how many of these ideas have come into prominence, and been adopted by some of the largest and most innovative of companies. Note that I recommended you read these pieces selectively, according to your interest - specifically, I suggest looking at Chapter 6, which notes that 4/5 Fortune 500 Businesses issue sustainability reports, and that 10 trillion dollars – real money, as they note – is pivoting to including environmental performance measures such as climate stress-testing in their financial assessments. Chapter 7 was also spot on, with its description of supply chain initiatives in the Food Industry, and Chapter 10 put the ideas of resilience – which we’ve looked at both in our complexity analysis class and in our resource management classes – to work as a key concept for corporations, who need to plan for shock and stress.
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